[Volume 5] A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World

A General Collection of the Best and Most Interesting Voyages and Travels in All Parts of the World is a 17-volume compilation of travel narratives assembled by the Scottish historian and poet John Pinkerton (1758-1826), first published in Great Britain in 1808-14. A contemporary and acquaintance of the historian Edward Gibbon and the novelist Sir Walter Scott, Pinkerton wrote books on Scottish history and poetry, numismatics, and other topics, as well as his own plays and poems.

Many of the narratives were newly translated into English from French, German, Dutch, Latin, Italian, Spanish, and other European languages. Each volume is illustrated with plates. A six-volume American edition of Pinkerton's collection of voyages was published in Philadelphia in 1810-12.

Shown here is the fifth volume of the original London edition, which includes narratives of travel by Europeans to Italy, Spain, and Switzerland. The first work, Travels in the Two Sicilies and Some Parts of the Apennines, is by Abbe Lazzaro Spallanzani (1729-99), a distinguished physiologist. It is followed by "A Dissertation on the Earthquakes in Calabria Ultra, Which Happened in the Year 1783" by Deodat de Dolomieu (1750-1801); and Travels in Spain: Containing a New, Accurate, and Comprehensive View of that Country, by Jean-Francois de Bourgoing, a French ambassador in Madrid, first published in 1789. The concluding work in this volume is Travels in Switzerland and in the Country of the Grisons by William Coxe (1748-1828), which takes the form of a series of letters by Coxe to author and translator William Melmoth.